Salman Rushdie to publish next book on digital platform only

Salman Rushdie has decided to publish his next work of fiction on a digital platform only.

The author’s decision came during the COVID-19 pandemic when he decided to try things he has never tried before. The latest work is a serialised work of fiction, a novella, and will be published on Substack.

Speaking to The Guardian, Rushdie explained, “It’s to do with this enforced condition we’ve all been in of being pushed inwards … I published this book of essays [which was] the 20th book and I’m already writing the 21st book, which is a novel. I just thought: do something else. And exactly the moment I was thinking that this project cropped up.”

On Substack readers subscribe to writers individually, then read whatever they post online which is usually a mixture of paid and free content.

“I’m going to kind of make it up as I go along, but I have some starting points,” Rushdie explains, adding that he will be posting short stories as well as literary news, and opinions on books and film.

“I always wanted to write about movies. There was one moment 100 years ago, when somebody at the New Yorker was taking paternity leave and I was asked if I’d like to step in for a couple of months to be their film critic. I thought that was a wonderful idea and I said, ‘yes, please’. Then the critic in question ended up not taking the paternity leave so I got fired before I started.”

The latest novella, The Seventh Wave, is a 35,000 word story of a film director, their muse- an actor, and gangsters, written in the style of New Wave cinema.

The serialised release is treated as a digital experiment by Rushdie, who harks back to the days of Dickens who was also known to serialise his work, “the way [it] used to be published, right at the beginning” says Rushdie.

New sections of the story will be released about once a week over the course of about a year. Read more at The Guardian.